Fisheries Committee on Oct. 28th, 2024

[Mel Arnold, Conservative, North Okanagan—Shuswap, BC]

Don't you feel that the fee would get eaten up simply by the administrative costs of the fee?

[Bonny Brokenshire]

Potentially, yes.... There would be a bit more money there, I guess, if it went into a coffer of sorts.

I'm not too familiar with what's being proposed.

[Mel Arnold, Conservative, North Okanagan—Shuswap, BC]

Okay.

You mentioned disposal and so on. What types of materials can be repurposed or recycled? Steel or aluminum vessels seem fairly apparent. Beyond that, is there any recycling available?

[Bonny Brokenshire]

The wooden boats are just landfilled. The fibreglass ones are crushed into cubes. I don't know what they do with those cubes of fibreglass afterwards. I think a lot of them are destined for the landfills as well.

[Mel Arnold, Conservative, North Okanagan—Shuswap, BC]

I'll go back to the jurisdictional piece.

You've spoken a lot about the buoys in the bay and so on. There has been a similar problem on Shuswap Lake. The battle seems to be ongoing over whose jurisdiction it is, whether it's Transport Canada, the ministry of environment, the province or even a regional district. They're determining who has the responsibility or jurisdiction to remove unregistered buoys and so on.

How have you managed to work around that? Is it easier because it is a marine or sea-type environment? Is it really just the federal government, or are there multiple jurisdictions involved there as well?

[Bonny Brokenshire]

In my experience, it is just clear-cut with our scenarios—the sea floor being provincially regulated in and around Bowen Island, but the water column and the buoys being federally authorized. It's Transport Canada that I go to. The navigation protection officers are the ones I really lean on heavily for support.

[Mel Arnold, Conservative, North Okanagan—Shuswap, BC]

Okay. Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ken McDonald]

Thank you, Mr. Arnold

We'll now go to Mr. Kelloway for five minutes or less, please.

[Mike Kelloway, Liberal, Cape Breton—Canso, NS]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

To the witnesses, thank you very much. I'm going to start with Mayor Mitchell.

First, Mayor, thanks for your opening testimony giving us a picture of how the derelict vessels impact a community, not just from an environmental standpoint—that alone would be enough—but also with respect to property values and just a community self-esteem aspect.

You talked about the journey. I think it's 21 years, 30 years, something to that effect. It had me thinking in terms of your leadership. Being in the grassroots, you clearly heard about this every day, going to the grocery store, the home hardware store, whatever the case may be. We have come to a successful resolution 30 years later—speed, that's not.

Can you drill down a little bit in your testimony in terms of this example? I was going to call it a best practice, but I'm not sure I would call it that. Give us some recommendations from a federal perspective working with a community or working with municipalities.

What are we doing well and what could we be doing better, based on your experience in Bridgewater, which I spent a lot of time in? I used to work at the Nova Scotia Community College and spent a lot of time at the Lunenburg campus.

Then I'll share my time with MP Hardie. Thank you.

[David Mitchell]

Thank you. That's a great question.

What's happening well now is that there are some tools in place. There are some insurance requirements for larger vessels, certainly, to make sure that, if they are abandoned, there's a way to get the funding out of the insurance company to scrap them. Certainly for us, the ship-source pollution fund—we need to think of a new name; it's a tongue twister—was something that we could tap into, which, I think, makes the decision easier when it comes to the federal government and the Coast Guard, because you don't have to use taxpayer funds. It should be a much more thought-out, difficult process to trigger a million-dollar cheque for ship dismantling, so I think that made it easier. I think those things are working well.

I think what could be improved is this. Each of you are elected to represent your communities, and some of your communities have abandoned vessels. Sometimes I feel that the disconnect can be actually with the member of Parliament. Our riding is massive—Halifax all the way down almost to Yarmouth. My MP has six hours in a car sometimes just to get from tip to tip, so the disconnect might be on really understanding the full impact.

As a mayor, I sometimes feel I don't always have the access to the federal government people who can help make a decision for my community, because sometimes it also goes beyond just the member of Parliament—government, not in government. It depends what side you are on sometimes.

If there's something that can be improved, I think it would be the collaboration among all parties when it comes to the grassroots and what the impact is on that community. For us, again, it should have been much shorter than 30 years to remove some of these vessels, which clearly had a number of impacts.

[Mike Kelloway, Liberal, Cape Breton—Canso, NS]

I totally agree.

I'll pass my time to MP Hardie.

[Ken Hardie, Liberal, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

It's a question for Ms. Brokenshire.

I had some correspondence from the Victoria yacht club and the Cadboro Bay Dead Boats Society. That's very poetic sounding, isn't it?

This will be a simple yes-or-no answer. They say in British Columbia that the province owns the beds of inland seas such as the Strait of Georgia. As such, B.C. provincial laws apply to coastal land-use activities such as the use of beaches, long-term moorage or siting and building docks, each of which are also subject to the Canadian Navigable Waters Act.

Also, they report that, within British Columbia, the seaward boundaries of waterfront municipalities are deemed to extend 300 metres seaward from the natural shore boundary. Accordingly, municipal bylaws and associated regulations applicable to activities, development and land and water use within those areas are eligible and applicable.

Is that the case? Is that your understanding?

[Bonny Brokenshire]

That is correct, yes.

[Ken Hardie, Liberal, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

Then we have real questions about jurisdiction, which I think we can take up in further questioning.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ken McDonald]

Thank you, Mr. Hardie.

We'll go to Madame Desbiens for two and a half minutes or less, please.

[Caroline Desbiens, Bloc, Beauport—Côte-de-Beaupré—Île d’Orléans—Charlevoix, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Mr. Mitchell, I want to come back to the Nipigon, which was sunk off the coast of Sainte‑Luce‑sur‑Mer in 2003. Initially, the estimated project cost was approximately $1 million. I think the project took five or six years to complete.

Previously, we heard that since 2016, $2.2 billion had been allocated to address the ghost ship issue. We were told that some results had been achieved. We were given a chart and told that about 100 ships had been removed from the water. We were also told that there are currently no tools to trace ghost ships.

What's your take on this? That's a lot of money, $2.2 billion. Are the funds being used in the right place? Or are they misdirected? Do we have the technology we need? Where do you think the problem lies?

[David Mitchell]

That's a great question.

Certainly, speaking as a municipality, I don't really know what tools we have other than contacting the other orders of government, whether it's the Department of the Environment, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans or their provincial counterparts. With regard to municipalities, especially for ours.... We're a small town of 9,000 people. We don't have the staff resources allocated. Even hearing about the funds that you're talking about that are available, I don't even know how we would know any of that because there is a bit of a disconnect, going back to the previous question on what we can do better.

Hearing there's $2 billion in funding for this, I think that you're 100% right. In 2024, we should have better tools to identify.... I even think of, in many ways, this: Why are we treating vessels differently from cars? Everyone has to register their car. They have to do it every year. Hearing about $10 every five years, I wonder why we aren't doing that every year. I think that those are the things that we could be doing better in 2024.

[Caroline Desbiens, Bloc, Beauport—Côte-de-Beaupré—Île d’Orléans—Charlevoix, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Mitchell.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ken McDonald]

Thank you, Madame Desbiens.

We'll now go to Ms. Barron for two and a half minutes or less, please.

[Lisa Marie Barron, NDP, Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Ms. Brokenshire, I think I'm going to skip my last question that I asked you to follow up on, but it would be good, of course, for us to get in writing any impacts that you saw to the ocean floor bed from the excessive number of vessels that were moored in that area that you were talking about.

I want to ask specifically about the enforcement. We know that we currently have a system in place where it's easier for vessel owners to abandon their vessels than to actually dispose of them properly. There are a lot of good mariners out there who want to do the right thing, but we don't have the systems in place to ensure that mariners know how and where to dispose of their vessels. It's an ongoing problem.

We've touched today on the delay in being able to identify the vessel owner, and we know how interconnected this is with the enforcement of this. You talked about how it would be helpful to see an increase of enforcement provisions in the mooring of the mooring buoys. I'm wondering if you have seen delays as a result of not being able to identify vessel owners or delays, period, that you could highlight for us.

[Bonny Brokenshire]

Thank you.

Yes, it is tricky. There are often huge delays in identifying the last known owner of a vessel. Sometimes I'll go through five different owners, or even just two, and the scent is lost. The trail goes cold. Yes, it's really tricky to identify them.

With our local bylaws in place now, on that lack of anonymity, there is a better chance to find the owners because we have the jurisdiction through our letters patent for 300 metres from high-water mark seaward, so we were able to establish that list. That was one part of your question.

If I could go to the mooring buoy piece to that, as I've stated, I think it's a very crucial part of this puzzle. It's really tricky to, as I say, encourage or to mobilize the support from Transport Canada. They do great work, but they're just inundated with work. As I say, in 15 years, we were able to do two sweeps around Bowen Island, not for lack of trying, and we have great relationships, working relationships, with TC staff.

I feel that the reactivity is there with respect to being the receiver of wreck and being able to quickly deal with a vessel that is a potential polluter. However, the identification and the proactivity are missing.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ken McDonald]

Thank you, Ms. Barron.

We'll now go to Mr. Bragdon.

To make sure everybody gets their rounds in, we're going to do two four-minute rounds. We're going to do four minutes for Mr. Bragdon and then four minutes for Mr. Hardie, before we finish up.

You're up, sir.

[Richard Bragdon, Conservative, Tobique—Mactaquac, NB]

Very good. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to the witnesses for providing testimony today, and thank you for your time, for your expertise and knowledge, and for your experiences. We appreciate it.

I'll start with you, Mayor Mitchell, and you can speak to this as well, Ms. Brokenshire, from your perspective. Is there a prioritization based on the level of risk that certain vessels pose to the surrounding environments and ecosystems? How does that get established?

Have you found that there's been good co-operation, whether it's with the Department of Transport or the federal government, in responding to that, when you're saying that this is urgent and this needs to be dealt with or we're going to have an ecological crisis on our hands or have a real problem?

How have you found the uptake? When you hear testimony that it takes 30 years to get a vessel out of the water.... I know it's a complicated business. It's not simple, but there must be a way of prioritizing those types of situations. Can both of you speak to that?

I'll start with you, Mayor Mitchell.

[David Mitchell]

Thanks. That's a great question.

I can't fully answer it because I don't know what the criteria is for prioritization. I only know that there was some—as loose as it was—by hearing that from my former member of Parliament, Bernadette Jordan, who was, I believe, instrumental in bringing in some of the new changes and regulations for this. She explained at the time why ours were not first on the list. Of course, I thought all of our things should be first on the list, but I understood that there were some others.

However, I don't know what that criteria is, and it is perhaps something that needs to be revisited because, as I said in my opening remarks, at many points, the Cormorant sunk, touched the floor, the seabed. It listed and chemicals were coming out, yet fast-forward and it was still there 10 more years. If that's not on the cusp of an ecological disaster, I don't know. Maybe others were worse.

[Richard Bragdon, Conservative, Tobique—Mactaquac, NB]

Was there ongoing communication with the department throughout that time, Mayor Mitchell? Were they reaching out? Was the Department of Transport, DFO or your area MP, I'm sure, trying to say that it was an urgent matter? Did you find that there were any extra efforts put in at that point? Was there a response there, or is there a mechanism?

Obviously, there needs to be more clarity around that. That's for sure.